Dave Turner - An Agile Journey, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Change

I have to confess, when I arrived at the January 2016 Agile Yorkshire event, I was feeling nervous. As a first-timer and a non-developer, I was there taking notes—what was I getting myself into? Thankfully, I was met with a warm welcome, a lot of friendly faces, and speakers who really gave me something to think about. David Turner discussed his Agile Journey with the group, highlighting the growing confusion around Agile terminology. As ‘Agile’ means different things to different people, it is important to check there is a common understanding from the outset. Rather than focusing on ‘Agile’ David focuses on pragmatic delivery, i.e. what is the problem you are trying to solve? David believes Agile is really a people management issue, for example, ‘how can you best manage a group of IT professionals to deliver something of value?’ He suggested that a good start would be autonomous teams empowered to make decisions, highlighting the importance of thinking about individuals and what motivates them. David emphasised that emergent architecture is good; rather than making wrong architecture decisions too early, defer these decisions to the point where they need to be made. On discussing Agile roles, David’s view is that ‘4 developers and a whiteboard’ are all that’s needed (at this point in the presentation, developers nodded their heads in agreement!) [While a sharp intake of breath could be heard from the rest of the audience - ed]. Finally, David reinforced the importance of treating projects as individuals –a ‘one size fits all’ mantra is not being Agile. Write-up by Emma Murphy